


things will change, but you'll be alright

by paopuleaf



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: (to the surprise of everyone including me), Cat Communication Buttons, During the Grand Siesta, M/M, Reunions, cheese cubes, kind of fluff? more like. comfort with an underlying hurt, tilldec but they took like three years to sort out their issues, tillman henderson (actually talks about his feelings)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:20:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27609590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paopuleaf/pseuds/paopuleaf
Summary: “your hair’s longer,” is the first thing tillman says, standing in the doorway of declan’s apartment.“yeah,” they respond, after a moment - caught off guard, probably, “hair does that.”-(or; tillman shows up at declan's apartment after three and a half years of not talking, and meets their cat, among other things.)
Relationships: Declan Suzanne & Socks Maybe, Tillman Henderson & Declan Suzanne, Tillman Henderson/Declan Suzanne
Comments: 7
Kudos: 44





	things will change, but you'll be alright

**Author's Note:**

> tillman uses he/him  
> declan uses he/they  
> socks maybe uses any pronouns but i use they/them here primarily !
> 
> this was initially started as a sequel to "[i'll rust with you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26893393)," which was my first tilldec fic, like, ever, but it became its own thing ! no reading necessary unless you want more of the boys

“your hair’s longer,” is the first thing tillman says, standing in the doorway of declan’s apartment. 

“yeah,” they respond, after a moment - caught off guard, probably, “hair does that.”

“no shit.”

tillman runs a hand through his own hair, feeling out how it falls nearly down to his elbow, now, still half-shaved and messy. he needs to cut it, sometime, but every time he goes to it just gets longer again. (only ever on the unburnt side.) artificial time. neither of them have aged a day since blaseball started, he knows, and neither of them will until it ends. even on siesta.

declan stares at him until he steps inside, kicking off his sneakers without much ceremony and watching them bounce into place in the corner of the shelf. “why’re you here, tilly?” they have a shelf, now. a mess of buttons is by the kitchen opening, and there’s socks, lying on the couch. they got a cat. “tillman,” they repeat, and that grabs his attention, because they don’t  _ use  _ his full name. “why are you here?”

“cringe questions for my fail-” pause. “ _ the  _ fail- declan,” tillman finishes lamely. “you have a shift tonight?”

“i’d already be  _ gone  _ if i had a shift tonight. i  _ wish  _ i had a fuckin’ shift tonight.” the last part is quiet. quiet by declan standards, at least. volume control isn’t either of their strong suits. “... i don’t have one for a couple days. you’re staying?”

“you’ll have me?”

“didn’t think you’re the type to ask first.”

“get your head in the game, idiot, things change.”

declan laughs, rough. “yeah,” they say, “guess they do.” one hand latches onto the jacket draped across the back of the couch and shrugs it on. tillman bumps into a cat tower that wasn’t there before and takes two steps back before he lets himself acknowledge he doesn’t  _ know  _ this place anymore. 

“you notice we still haven’t aged?” tillman asks. his tattoos are the same as always. his height is the same as always. he still bumps into the low-hanging pot of flowers that declan got from dreamy that one time, because he’s too short to see it coming but too tall to avoid it. “ _ ow- _ these things haven’t fucking died yet?”

“nah. even if socks keeps trying to eat them.” declan drifts along a couple feet behind him, a ghost in his own apartment, settling against the doorway with a knock of plastic headphones against wall. “and- yeah, duh. dunno why’d they’d let us age on siesta if they haven’t for the past eleven seasons.”

“haven’t you heard? old people are all the fuckin’ rage with the kids these days. they could get tons more coins if they just made all these dirtbags look all wrinkly. not me, though, i’m in my prime.” 

“pff- yeah, i’m sure, bro, then they’d advertise you as being so old but using some- jamazon skin product. unpog mlm schemes.” declan pronounces ‘mlm’ like one word, muh-lum, absolutely insufferable in the same way they say ‘lmao’ like  _ la-mao _ . at least tillman has the decency to spell them out. “i’d get grey hairs. you want me to have grey hairs?”

tillman looks back at them, ready with -  _ some  _ retort on his tongue. he sees declan, unchanged except for the hair nearly to his ass, wearing the same jacket he has since season seven, standing in the middle of an apartment tillman only half-recognizes, and stops. “nah,” he manages, even though there’s something in his throat, “would be hella cringe. you gotta advertise the m-l-m schemes with me.”

“obv.” 

he wouldn’t call the silence they fall into uncomfortable, but it’s definitely not - comfortable, either. neither of them can pretend like it’s season eight again, or right after the chiclawgo series, or - anywhere close to what it was before his incineration. tillman kind of doesn’t want to. “you got a cat.”

“socks, yeah.” declan grins, all light, and tillman shoves his attention back to the fridge so he doesn’t have to think about it. “hey, c’mere, socks, come say hi.”

there’s a soft thud as socks jumps down from their perch on the couch, stretching before they pad over to the mess of buttons and weave to the middle. “[hi] [tillman],” they greet, in a voice that’s definitely declan’s, “[bastard].”

tillman chokes out a laugh, caught off guard, leaning on the fridge for balance. “bastard yourself, you little shit,” he responds, and socks meows, loud. when he tosses a look around the door, declan’s crouched down, scratching socks behind the ears.

“[bastard],” they imitate, before repeating it out loud, and socks makes this hissy kinda laughter as their collar rings. “they have a motherfucker button around here somewhere- i didn’t even give them that one, they just fucking- just  _ manifest  _ whenever socks feels like being more of an asshole. don’t bite me, i’m right- ow!”

“l-m-a-o, what you deserve,” tillman says, turning back to the fridge and pulling out a few cheese blocks from the drawer. they  _ still  _ keep like, four too many in there, but at least its ready for guests. or - tillman. he’s not really sure where he is, right now. “cutting boards?”

“same place.”

“under the sink, right? the single shittiest place you could put cutting boards.”

“[fuck] [off].”

“was that socks, or you?”

there’s an overlapping response of [socks] and [declan], and tillman ducks his head down into his jacket, hiding a grin with a call of “assholes!” the cutting boards  _ are  _ still under the sink, stacked precariously next to the tupperware box of batteries and the pipelines, and the smallest slides out easy. it’s a little more worn under his fingers, and there’s new scratches overlaying the place where he and declan had fucked around one night, drunk as all hell, and carved their names in. 

still the same lameass cutting board though, with the knife slid inside its little pocket, and he sets both down on the counter and gets to slicing. there’s a constant white noise of socks and declan going back and forth with the buttons, before declan yelps and scrambles onto the tile, one hand covered in shadow that they shake off quick. “socks, stop using your fucking shadow jutsu on me whenever i call you an asshole!”

“r-i-v to you, but i would simply not let a cat-” tillman stops. “wait, what the fuck is up with socks? shadow jutsu, dec, really?”

“what the fuck else am i supposed to call it, tilly! they try to take me to the fucking shadows! they paid fucking  _ mike townsend  _ twenty bucks to throw my xbox into the lake, like, a year back!”

“ _ mike townsend? _ ”

“that’s what  _ i  _ said!”

“[michael],” states socks, before padding off into declan’s bedroom. no further elaboration. typical cat. 

tillman finishes the first set of cheese cubes, sliding them to a corner of the cutting board with the knife and looking back up to declan. they’ve gotten to their feet again, one hand braced against the edge of the oven and the other reaching for a cube - oh,  _ hell  _ no. “dec, i swear to god, i’ll cut your finger off, don’t get any closer to these cubes.”

“i bought the cheese blocks.”

“and i’ll have to buy peanuts after taking you out of this fucking world, loser, get out of my cubes!”

declan snickers, “aw, you’d buy me peanuts, you care.”

“no, i’d eat them all- in victory, obviously.”

“yeah, yeah.”

the silence is more comfortable, this time. tillman settles into it like a blanket, the kind of familiarity/unfamiliarity. he manages to finish cutting before declan speaks up again, trying for nonchalant and not quite hitting it. “how long has it been?”

“you’re asking  _ me  _ about time?” tillman slides the knife into the sink, takes out his phone. “give me a sec-” he scrolls through his gallery until he finds the ‘cringe time folder,’ flicking down the rows of pictures - one a day, usually stupid shit he or the thieves were pulling, the occasional shot of the telescope - before getting to the very end. the beginning. “started this at the beginning of the siesta, so, that’s- plus one- three n’ a half cringeass years.”

“holy shit.”

“yeah,” tillman agrees. “you never called.”

“yeah.” declan doesn’t look away. doesn’t deny it. they just sound tired. maybe regretful, maybe apologetic. “was pretty shitty of me.”

tillman blinks. “it kinda was,” he says, because he was expecting declan to get mad at him, or something. they probably should be mad at him, just like he has every right to be mad at them, because they’re both kinda fuckups. three years does a lot to dull shit, though, and declan could never really hold onto their anger anyway. “ _ definitely  _ was, actually, you dick. … i didn’t call either.”

“you didn’t.” 

“shitty.”

“wow, look at how good we’ve gotten at this.” declan snorts, shoulders relaxed, one hand bumping against tillman’s forearm. “three and a half years ago you would’ve called me a crybaby bitch and then denied ever having feelings.”

“three and a half years ago you would’ve gotten all pissy and then we would’ve ignored the whole fucking issue, dec, because we’re both pieces of shit.” 

they shrug. “probably. joshua finally roped me into going to therapy.”

“what the fuck,” tillman replies, because what the fuck. “is that why you got a cat?”

“nah, socks just kinda showed up at the firehouse after- after kirby got, y’know, and decided to follow  _ me  _ home even though butt has a perfectly nice house.” declan glances over their shoulder at their bedroom door, then to the buttons. “they’re… a cat. people who talk about pets helping with structure were right, even if socks’ isn’t, like,  _ anyone’s  _ pet, y’know? the structure.”

“lame,” tillman says reflexively, and declan kicks him in the shin. fucker. (fair.) “shoe thieves aren’t lame, i guess. they’ve been cool. taught me some, like, cringe coping mechanisms for my fail problems disorder or whatever.” the words don’t feel pulled out, like they might’ve been, he’s just -  _ saying  _ them.

“lame,” declan jokes, a little lilt at the end, and tillman kicks them right back. he can nearly hear the fucker they would toss right back. “glad you’re doing okay, dude.”

“what, were you worried?”

  
  
“that’s for me to know and  _ you  _ to die wondering.”

“hate it here. can’t have shit in declan suzanne’s apartment.”

declan tosses a cheese cube at his face, nose all scrunched up as he grins, and he barely misses catching it in his mouth, and the apartment feels more comfortable than it ever did before, somehow.

(and later- 

“we’ve still got a lot to talk about,” tillman says, crushed under the weight of socks on his chest as he lays back on declan’s couch. “stupid heart shit, and all that.”

“shrug emoji,” declan says  _ out loud,  _ and they don’t even shrug along with it. awful. “you wanna go on like, a real date? that’s where people talk about shit, right?”

“gay.” declan gives him a look, like they’re saying ‘no shit’, and tillman scrambles his thoughts together into  _ something  _ coherent. “i don’t wanna go back to whatever lameass shit we were on in season eight, or whatever. i will  _ actively  _ become homophobic if we do.”

declan nods, reaches over to pet socks. “that was lame as fuck,” they agree, “so like- we won’t. pretty sure we can be emotionally mature for once.”

“hit the brakes on the shitty el camino whenever we need to?”

“yeah, duh. healthy relationships book for dummies. isn’t jaylen on the lovers now? socks can teleport over and come back with some hot tips.”

tillman turns it over in his mind, leans back into that blanket-feeling. he’s missed it. “we’re not letting the fucking cat give us dating advice,” he decides on, and declan snickers. socks headbutts his chest. “you’re a cat, shut the fuck up. but i’m down to demo this shit if you are.”

“obv. how do you feel about mcdlonald’s-”

“our first date is  _ not  _ gonna be at a fucking mcdlonald’s, dec, i’ll bean you-”

“for dinner  _ tonight, tilly- _ ”

and socks jumps off tillman’s chest, and declan kicks at his feet, and the warm blanket feeling settles somewhere in his heart for a hopeful-permanent stay.)

**Author's Note:**

> yeah! yeah  
> you can find me on twitter @ ghostcatboys, or on tumblr @ catboydeicide, or in the crabitat wrigen probably about to get killed for tillman henderson character development crimes


End file.
